Small, slim and supremely inexpensive
DAC | £59 | whf.cm/iFiGoLink
When we received news of the portable iFi Go Link late last year, we were promised a digital-to-audio converter (DAC) that would deliver “supercharged” sound at a “super-affordable” price. The idea of supreme sound for a minimal financial outlay always sounds like the stuff of dreams, but it can often turn out to be a nightmare if you realise you are landed with a cheap and flimsy piece of tat that offers few discernible benefits.
Still, there are some DACs that manage to buck that trend by marrying slimline designs with value for money and discernible improvements in your source’s audio performance. Just look at the ultra-compact, Award-winning AudioQuest DragonFly Cobalt USB DAC or the equally impressive Astell & Kern AK USB-C Dual DAC Cable for proof that size doesn’t always matter.
Versatility…
The Go Link comprises the main DAC unit, a small corded cable and a built-in USB-C plug, with interchangeable USB-A or Apple’s Lightning connector adapters also included. This means you can plug the DAC into a laptop if it still uses the larger USB-A port, or simply use the standard USB-C end to plug into the requisite slot if you’re using a more up-to-date model. The Go Link can also be used with smartphones.
Nothing here is cheap or flimsy, and we are impressed by little touches such as the metal casework as opposed to budget plastic. While some DACs, even supposedly portable ones, can add significant weight to your set-up, here the experience is essentially the same as listening to a standard pair of wired headphones, so much so that (sonic improvements aside) you are likely to forget that the Go Link is even plugged in after a time.
A couple of minor niggles: the USB-C connector on our sample would occasionally drop out or come loose from the source’s socket. This might have been a problem at our end, but the DAC does tend to need stillness from its source. Given the corded design, we also worry that the connecting point between plug and wire might fatigue over time.
The range of file types supported here is more than we would expect for this sort of price. The Link Go backs PCM audio playback up to 32-bit/384kHz, along with DSD up to 11.2MHz (DSD 256) and MQA, the last of which is handy for anyone subscribed to Tidal’s excellent Hi-Fi Plus tier.
…and virtue
We plug the DAC into our Windows Surface laptop to dig out a high-resolution recording of Fleet Foxes’ Wading In Waist-High Water, and the resulting listen through our Grado SR325x headphones is an invigorating one. The track’s two main moods –
